Monday, July 29

At the Beach: Traveling with Food Allergies Part 2

I wrote a little bit about our fun beach trip in my last post. We successfully ate at a few restaurants in Ocean City, Maryland that cooked safe allergy-friendly meals for Little Guy. Since he has limited options to eat at restaurants due to his food allergies to dairy, egg, nuts, sesame and wheat, I also packed a cooler full of safe food for him to eat throughout the trip. So what did I pack? Even though this is a poor quality photo of our hotel's micro-fridge, this is the second year I'm posting a photo of our fridge. I figure it might help someone else, but it will also help me remember what I packed in preparation for future vacations! It's also fun to compare, since last year I packed SO much more food.

Here are the allergy-friendly foods I packed on our beach vacation this year:

What did we have left? A few avocados, chicken nuggets, juice boxes, and a container of bean salad. Although I packed WAY too many clothes for the kiddos, I was happy with the amount of food I packed!The last morning of our vacation we tried to use up some of the food we brought and we had a big breakfast together including waffles, sausage, fruit, yogurt and OJ. I cooked the sausage in the hotel room's microwave, and the waffles in a small toaster oven we brought along.

Little Guy loved it.

Another thing we have to think about when traveling at the beach (and all the time!) is where to put the epipens since they need to stay somewhat temperature controlled. I read online about using a thermos with nothing else in it to store the epipens. You don't necessarily want to COOL them with ice, but you don't want to just leave them in a bag in the sun. So, we put them in a thermos in our beach bag under the shade of an umbrella.This solution has worked for us so far, but I should have added a big label on the outside of this noting that epipens were inside of it - just to be safe in case someone needs them and doesn't know. I'm going to look into other carriers/storage ideas for warm climates. I thought this list of popular epi-pen carriers was a really useful tool from the blog Grateful Foodie.

So what ELSE did we do at the beach? Well, we had FUN!!

We biked on the boardwalk in the morning.

We walked on the boardwalk at night.

We played in the sand.

We watched the sunset from the peaceful hotel porch.

We're so thankful that we made many happy memories this vacation!What happy memories have you made so far this summer (with or without food allergies)!??